Big deal, we've been "3D printing" buildings by hand for centuries.
How does 3D printing work? You lay down layers of grains of your material and sinter or otherwise stick them together, and build up an arbitrary structure that way.
Well in the building case, you use grains called "bricks", stick them together not by sintering but with mortar, but you still build an arbitrarily-shaped (within the limits of what will stay up) structure from a uniform store of material. Just replace the printing head with a bricklayer, who is probably just as fast and cheaper than a robot anyway.
The Byzantines managed to 3D print the Hagia Sofia in three years nearly seventeen centuries ago, and it's still standing.
Ah, I see we're still doing the "top dismissive comment" thing around here. Good to know.
Computers? Bah! We've been "computing" for centuries.
How does it work? You take a pencil and paper -- or a pen (should you be feeling bold), and you write out the computations one by one, and build up a result that way.
Pythagoras managed to compute that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, and that rule still stands.
How does 3D printing work? You lay down layers of grains of your material and sinter or otherwise stick them together, and build up an arbitrary structure that way.
Well in the building case, you use grains called "bricks", stick them together not by sintering but with mortar, but you still build an arbitrarily-shaped (within the limits of what will stay up) structure from a uniform store of material. Just replace the printing head with a bricklayer, who is probably just as fast and cheaper than a robot anyway.
The Byzantines managed to 3D print the Hagia Sofia in three years nearly seventeen centuries ago, and it's still standing.